Yet another seditious post from E@L, striving to get himself kicked out of most countries in South East Asia before he has saved enough stashed enough away in a tax-shelter to retire!

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The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not. – Eric Hoffer

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I have a great deal of religious tolerance. I tolerate most atheists, for example.

So long as they prove their dedication to their belief in the absence of any god, spirit, demon, faerie, whil-o-the-whisp or transcendent being whatsoever, by walking slowly over a bed of hot coals in my BBQ area while feverishly chanting, “This fucking burns like crap, this fucking burns like crap”, then jumping into the pool, showing me the blistering flesh, sending me their skin transplant expenses and suing the fuck out of me afterward.

I also accept those atheists who tell me, when asked to commit to the above test, to fuck off, pour another glass of shiraz and put a thick slab of endangered species (cow) on the coals instead.

Agnostics I once tolerated, but only for personal reasons. I empathized with their lack of conviction. For, though life is too short to sit on the fence of not giving-a-fuck, I have been there, have the fence-post indentation in my arse to prove it. (Any excuse to get some hits to that video!)

But not any more. Those with even the tiniest, eensiest, weensiest bit of religion…? Metaphysical gamblers with that smug swagger of a Pascalian wager, accepted…? Fuck off!

“Religious nutters”, is how I classify ANYONE WHO BELIEVES ANYTHING these days. I realize this may be a tad extreme in itself, but it’s the only way to be sure, as James Cameron once had someone say.

Let’s take some examples of E@L’s current position.

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Statement: The universe is an immense, amazing, beautiful place: we respond to its Hubble images in awe and call its beauty the handiwork of God. The mechanism of it works so well, it rolls on like clockwork (at least on the Euclidian schoolboy level), someone must have designed it, right? and of course it must have started somehow. Let’s call that start of things, that biggest of all big bangs, the coitus that created us – ‘God’. Ergo, God, or something, was there before the universe began to will it/us all into existence.

E@L’s Response: Let’s call the men in white coats for you. (Similar to Einstein’s response to a similar argument: “Yes the stars ARE pretty tonight.”) Let’s call it the set of sets that contain nothing. Does that set contain itself? The universe is Russell’s paradox. The universe began when it began. Time began when the universe began. To say “before the universe began” is a contradiction.

Let’s say there was nothing. Let’s say there was God. Is there a difference? No. Let’s not debate any further. You’re an idiot. Fuck off.

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Statement: I think we need to acknowledge that without God there would be anarchy. People need rules, a source for authority, a standard for morality.

E@L’s Response: There is no God and yet there is no* anarchy. QED. Fuck off. Is there ONE moral standard that holds good in every circumstance? Just ONE? Name it, please. (Was reading this in a Chekov story the other day – how all moral codes devolve into exceptions; exception after exception.)

* Well, not as much as you’d expect.~~~~~~~~~~

Statement: I am afraid of death. I am suffering awfully from the piles/cancer/bad feet and I want peace after death. I want vengeance on those who wronged me, yet they have escaped the legal system – I want them to burn in hell forever for lying on their expense claims form. Plus I want to live forever – I want this consciousness, this me, this I, to be eternal and I want the entire 13 billions years and inestimable distances and unmeasurable masses of this universe to have been created specifically for me and for the other 143,999 white Anglo-Saxon humans who are saved or OK anybody who lived in the past half-million years or who are living now.

That silence… for all those eons before your birth, contemplate it, it’s coming back.

You humans are less than a blip in the radar of our Alturian Sentient Creature Detector. Ants, with their superior biomass*, however…

* Or was it worms?~~~~~~~~~

Statement: A member of the Church Of the Latter Day Saints, an American named Yettaw, constructs some artificial platypus feet, straps himself to some empty plastic bottles and swims through a fetid swamp towards the house of Burmese political detainee, Aung San Suu Kyi, where he gets cramps, asks for Thai foot massage, camps overnight, pulls out a Bible, says some Mormonistic prayers which are of course wasted as all are Buddhists, and promptly is arrested and sent for severe and hopefully unrelenting torture in the notorious Insein prison in Yangon, thereby compromising a) the entire Burmese/Western reconciliation process in the lead up to the forthcoming elections, b) Aung San Suu Kyi’s health, as her Doctor is arrested for being there at the same time, c) her life, due to her being arrested, with the possibility of being placed in said notorious Insein prison, where many political prisoners die due to either the said severe and unrelenting torture (often unjustified, unlike the case of Mr Yettaw) or due to just plain neglect of their standard health needs, or both.

Daw Suu is of course a devout Buddhist, like most Burmese and, rather than holding Mr Yettaw’s head under the water of the fetid swamp with the hand-crafted sandal on one of her dainty feet until the bubbles stopped and then some, which is the correct American CIA procedure in such circumstances and permitted under their democratic reading of the Geneva Convention, she instead allowed him onto the grounds of her house out of the pure Christian* charity of her Buddhist upbringing, thereby fucking it up for everybody, herself mostly.

OK, maybe this was a set-up by the Burmese Junta to create an excuse to keep her locked up during the election process, or maybe it wasn’t. The rumours are rife. But the point is, although Mr Yettaw is something of a “vulnerable” individual, maybe made susceptible to manipulation by his shocking typical (atypical? You just can’t tell anymore) American trailer-home background and recent emotional damage, the Mormons certainly have him now, as well, perhaps as the Burmese secret police.

E@L’s Response: If Mr Yettaw did not believe in his version of God, none of this would have happened.

Before reading the above linked article I thought “Hey, the man is genuine religious nutter, not just a mildly perplexed person, trying to find harmony and reason in a world of contradiction and woe” (such as I have satirized above). If he had just stayed at home and prayed, all would have been well. If he been an atheist, he might have just read the New York Times and written something on his blog, as I have done.

As it stands, I still think he is a religious nutter.

Why did he fuck it up? What was his motivation?

He wanted to convert Aung San Suu Kyi to Mormonism. A woman who doesn’t even believe in hi concept of God!

The fucking … oh shit… the fucking religious nutter!

Why did swim? Because he couldn’t knock on her door, smile and ask, “Have you been talking to Jesus lately?” as quickly as he could before she told him to go fuck himself and slam the door sharply in his face.

What has he fucked up? The junta which some say had been slowly relaxing its throttling grip on the trachea of free speech since it killed all those monks last year, might have allowed something closer to free and fair elections in order to boost tourism in these harsh times, and after such results, Aung San Suu Kyi might have ridden down the streets of Yangon in triumph to her newly created theme-park and integrated resort! (Hey, as Singaporean support for the Junta expands, anything could happen.)

People would be able to talk freely in the tea-houses again. The walls of insane Insein prison would crumble, Burmese rice would once again feed the people of the fertile crescent, there would be joy in the streets rather than monkish killing and two-legged dogs could frighten touristic passers-by with their kangaroid lepping, unfettered and angry, once again.

I don’t know whose prayers have been answered by Mr Yattaw’s efforts, but it certainly weren’t those of us who wanted to seem some improvement in the situation in Burma and freedom for Aung San Suu Kyi!

* Anything good is “christian”, by definition: it always irks me how this word has been twisted.~~~~~~~~

Now you see why I am exhibiting zero (0, count ’em) tolerance for people who place the word God near their genuine and unalienable right to be spiritual and fuzzy brained. I am not denying them that – heck, I go quasi-existential all the time, just ask my boss…

It’s just that if you start equating God with spirituality, you start to get the idea that you are right and that other people are wrong, and that’s where the trouble starts.

I have a much easier way. Everyone is wrong.

And all Cretans are liars.

[Addendum: I’ll let Pascal, whom I sorta abused earlier, have the last word:

“Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions”— Blaise Pascal]

E@L

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11 Responses

I just managed to stop myself pressing the HQ button on your video. Also why the course editing of your dangly bits, could you not have pixellated them, (that is lowered the resolution of the area, not pixellated as in the Gary Cooper movie. Perhaps I mean both).

Tom: I was trying to keep it simple, minimally self-referential and thereby <>pre<>-post-modern… you know, for the kiddies.

Somewhere, DFW’s book on Infinity is hiding, waiting to pounce on me. I think, therefore like Descartes, I should lock myself in my room for several years and read all my books.

I am still trying to figure who all these “Z” authors you suggested could be. Somehow, I don’t see you as a Zola man, scouring the gritty coal face of sour social realism and serious social injustice. Zemyatin, well, we got that one easy. I swear I am not going to Amazon this, I am going to think…

b) You mean Infinite Jest? readitreaditreaditreadit! Just make sure you have two bookmarks!

c) Up yours – Germinal is a great book (and, as I’m sure you know, thousands of miners went to Zola’s funeral, chanting Ger-mi-nal! Ger-mi-nal!). Not counting Zamyatin, I also have Frank Zappa’s autobiography and Moon Unit’s first (and hopefully last unless she learns to write) novel.

I know what you’re saying E@L and I like the way you say it but there’s something karmic about that clown who swam across the lake. Flippered American crusader goes to Insein Burmese prison. You just can’t make that stuff up.

Dick: I have to disagreee. There’s nothing Karmic in there for poor Daw Suu. I can’t even find the Komic in it. At the moment I’m so angry at him, and by extension, all Mormons, and hence all believers in God. She was on the verge or release, at least technically. This low-functioning autistic goofball has just fucked it up tragically. Oh, I want to weep… I want to sic Dick Cheney and him merry band of Inquisitors on him…